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Buckeyes Excel in Classroom

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osugrad21

osugrad21

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Buckeye Football Team Excels in the Classroom

55 members of the team recorded a grade point average of 3.00 or better.

Jan. 13, 2006
The 2005 Ohio State football team wound up the season with a glittering 10-2 record, including a Big Ten co-championship and its fourth victory in as many tries in a BCS game. The Buckeyes closed out the year with seven consecutive wins and wound up No. 4 in the final rankings, their third top five finish in the past four years.
Coach Jim Tressel's Buckeyes also graded a winning performance in the classroom, where a record 55 members of the team recorded a grade point average of 3.00 or better during fall quarter. As a result of that effort, the team's overall GPA now stands at 2.81.
Wide receiver Anthony Gonzalez, for one, isn't surprised by the team's success in either arena.
"There is an emphasis here on doing well in both areas," says the Cleveland native. "The coaches stress it all the time. We know we are not just football players. Doing well in the classroom gets a lot of play."
Gonzalez has enjoyed more than moderate success in both areas. In addition to hauling in a career-best 28 receptions this past year, including an acrobatic 26-grab at Michigan to set up the winning touchdown for the Buckeyes, he also has recorded three consecutive 4.00s in the classroom and has a 3.42 GPA in philosophy.
Gonzalez, a third-year sophomore, is being mentioned as a possible Rhodes Scholar candidate. Ironically, if he were to receive that honor, he would join another Cleveland product, Mike Lanese, in a very select academic stratosphere. Lanese, who is best remembered for a diving catch against Michigan in 1984 that up until the Gonzalez grab was the most talked about reception in series history, was a 1985 Rhodes Scholar.
"It is definitely something I am thinking about and would like to pursue," said Gonzalez. "But it is a very competitive process, so there are no guarantees. Still, I would like to try."
 
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Football players’ report cards at Ohio State are worth a cheer

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1/15/06

Football players’ report cards at Ohio State are worth a cheer

Sunday, January 15, 2006

BOB HUNTER


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There’s no point in trying to sugarcoat this. As a rule, sports stories about academics make for dull reading.
This is not meant to disparage the importance of academics. Aside from the obvious benefits, they also are significant to the sports-page reader because they’re critical to the success or failure of any high-school or college athletics team.

Chances are, when you see one of those "My kid’s an honor-roll student" bumper stickers, your reaction is: a) Big deal, my kid gets good grades, too; b) Your kid is probably a nerd; or c) Why even have kids when you could drive around in a shiny, new Corvette?

So I know you’d probably rather read about why the Browns should trade William Green and Trent Dilfer for the chance to draft Reggie Bush than something about how well the Ohio State football team is doing in the classroom.

But here’s the deal: 56 Ohio State football players had gradepoint averages of 3.0 or better during fall quarter, according to a school news release. Coach Jim Tressel said the same figure was "probably around 20 five years ago." athletics. Over the course of my career, I have spoken with plenty of college athletes whom I’m convinced would be seriously challenged to pass a gradeschool proficiency test.

I remember a particular news conference in which an All-American basketball player answered four or five questions with the same answer — "I’m just doing the best I can and trying as hard as I can" — in such a pathetic way that I could have cried. A few months later he was taken in the first round of the NBA draft and became an instant millionaire.

The point is, I know there are potential problems with academic measurements. In the case of the Buckeyes, we obviously don’t know what classes these players are taking — a 3.0

You can say what you want about Ohio State’s poor scores on the NCAA academic report cards — and we have — but this seems to indicate how much Tressel stresses academics. His team, 10-2 on the field, had an overall GPA of 2.81, which would seem to disprove the notion that you can’t recruit good players who also are good students.

"Our goal is . . . to have a team GPA of 3.0, if we could do that," Tressel said. "To me, that would be a tremendous standard to set."

Before I go further, let me assure you I am no Pollyanna when it comes to academics in with a schedule of nuclear physics, astronomy and chemical engineering is clearly more impressive than one with a class load of bowling, art appreciation and cookie making. I likewise know that players have tutors available to them the average student doesn’t have.

But it’s also worth noting that the areas in which Ohio State has fared so poorly have focused more on the past than the present; the most recent data for the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate rating comes from the 2003-04 school year. (OSU’s football team scored 864 on the first APR, well below the 925 minimum to avoid sanctions; new figures are due next month.)
While the problems these studies reveal shouldn’t be ignored, Ohio State is right to emphasize an academic record as positive as the current one.

It would seem to show that the reasons for these academic successes aren’t a lot different than the ones that bring success on the field.

"The reality is, we won 10 games, and we still have to win some next year," Tressel said. "This quarter, we have 56 with 3.0s, and if we don’t stay at it, next quarter we could be talking about only having 20. It’s ongoing. We have to stay at it."

This is every bit an important as a win over Notre Dame, even if it bores us.
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.

[email protected]
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